I haven't touched this site much in a year.  It used to contain my political points of view, some tech tidbits and various outings.  I moved my political rants over to another blog site and stopped using this site since many of my coworkers see it since we use Windows Live Messenger throughout my place of employment.  I'm a vendor at Microsoft in the MSN division which is quickly morphing into the Windows Live division.  And as the Live web applications continue to grow, I'm more impressed.  So I'm reworking my Spaces site a bit so that it’s a bit more lighthearted.  My political blog is still out there and I'll leave it unnamed as I know many of those who see my Spaces through links from Messenger may disagree and I have enough of a load at work to keep things busy without adding the contention of differing viewpoints into the mix.

In family news, we've recently moved into a much larger home just about a mile south of our first home.  Our little 940 square foot rambler wasn't cutting it for size anymore.  It was a great house and a good investment.  With an active little boy who'll turn 2 this November, we needed more space though.  And now with a 2nd child on the way and due around March of next year, we have the space we need.  We are excited about the new child and the new one.  It'll be a little while before we can find out the gender.  With my wish already granted of a son as our first, I'm looking forward to find out if Kael is going to get a little brother or sister.

With the new house though we have so much work.  Our team at work is a bit short staffed and our work load has increased.  This is a good and a bad thing.  The good is the extra hours help out with all the various new costs and larger mortgage but it has left me much less time to work on the house and to get out and do the things we enjoy.  I've done very little hiking and my one camping trip this year turned into a death march starting at 9pm out of camp due to a really nasty stomach virus I received from my son.  It was almost 5 miles back to the parking lot along a cliff side trail in the dark.  I haven't had the time to go hiking since then.  I finally bought my first sea kayak in March of this year and have only had it out on local lakes a couple of times.  I'm still hoping to make up a little for lost time and get out for some hiking and kayaking this summer.  We sold our 1st house ourselves which caused us some headaches and took a lot of time.  But it saved us a bundle of cash.  We moved into our new place at the beginning of July.

I'm looking forward to providing updates and sharing pics of my family and outings with friends and other family members.  This site is meant to be family friendly, so while I welcome comments, please keep them clean or they will be deleted.